RAK Ceramics has just been officially recognised as the largest tile manufacturer in the world overtaking last year’s leader Marazzi Group to claim the top spot with 115 million square metres produced in 2009, a year when Italian manufacturers’ sales shrank by 18.3% with 14 factories shutting their doors, although of course this was dwarfed by the problems of the Spanish factories with sales down by nearly 30%.
The situation for the Italian factories does seem to be improving slightly with growth in the first quarter of this year, albeit very modest at 2% and with Spain the only market in the EU that grew at all. Spanish factories also experienced an increase in exports of 7.1% in March although poor sales in January and February meant that quarter 1 growth was still negative and the March increase was again to markets outside the EU and the domestic market was reportedly shrinking despite the Italian manufacturers success there.
So what does all this mean for the UK market, if anything? Well, anecdotal reports from the beginning of the year were that business was picking up, but that seems to have slowed or stopped for a lot of businesses in the months since the election. Topps has reported a slow down in the rate of decline in sales over the last quarter to 3rd July, which was taken as good news by most city analysts, but if we look at the government import statistics tile imports were down 14% by value for the first 5 months of the year, which means that businesses are cutting down on purchases either to reduce stock holdings and/or because sell through is still sluggish. Let’s hope that things begin to move a bit more quickly over the next few months.
